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Forrest S. McCartney, a Top NASA Official, Dies at 81

Forrest S. McCartney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who played a central role in developing military spy satellites and the MX intercontinental missile system before being appointed head of NASA’s civilian-run Kennedy Space Center not long after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, died Tuesday in a hospice near Cape Canaveral, Fla. He was 81.

The cause was cancer, his daughter Worthy McCartney said.

General McCartney was given command of the space center 18 months after the Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members aboard and leading to the suspension of the shuttle orbiter program. His deployment from the ranks of a largely secret military space program made him the focus of initial apprehension in the parallel civilian space-exploration universe.

But historians of NASA generally credit him with rebuilding public confidence in manned space missions, and helping restore the morale of a shaken work force at Cape Canaveral. He directed an extensive review of construction and launching protocols, oversaw the first shuttle launching after the Challenger disaster, and became known as a subtle but relentless defender of Kennedy Space Center turf in the perennial struggle with other NASA power centers, including the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and NASA headquarters in Washington.

Confusion over the chain of command had been identified by investigators as one of the causes of the 1986 disaster. In a 2001 interview with the Kennedy Space Center’s oral history project, General McCartney referred to that problem in describing his efforts to make the Kennedy Space Center’s leaders first among equals in decision making, at least in the matter of launchings.

“I just felt strongly that if the wheels came off we would certainly be accountable, and properly so,” he said. That was one of “the things that I tried to turn around: not to be the dominant person, but that we were equal at the table. And whether we roll — that was our decision to make. And that was a constant fight, you know. But I think we wore them down.”

Friction with NASA officials over policy and management issues eventually led to General McCartney’s resignation at the end of 1991.

Had he never become director of the space center, General McCartney would have been known solely as a pioneer of the American military’s unmanned space program. “He played a key role in getting the first reconnaissance satellites into space,” said Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,” a 2009 history of the secret space program led by Gen. Bernard Schriever of the Air Force, whom the future General McCartney served as a top aide in the 1960s.

Photo

Lt. Gen. Forrest S. McCartney near the space shuttle Atlantis in 1986. General McCartney ran the Kennedy Space Center.Credit
United Press International

General Schriever’s group is credited with a string of breakthroughs, including the first photo reconnaissance satellites, the first satellite mapping technology and the first successful recovery of an orbiting object after its return to Earth.

In the 1970s, General McCartney became program director for a project that established the ability of naval vessels and airplanes to communicate by satellite. A nuclear engineer by training, he became involved in the early 1980s in developing the MX intercontinental ballistic missile, known as the Peacekeeper, which has since been deactivated. Each MX missile carried 10 nuclear warheads, each one capable of reaching a separate target.

In 1983 he was promoted to lieutenant general and named commander of the Air Force Space Division, a military command whose work is for the most part highly classified. The transition from military to civilian administration, he said in the oral history interview, was not hard.

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“I’m not a typical military fellow, he said. “I came in the military and I got into the R&D business and the space business and I never did anything else. So I really wasn’t regimented into the flying and fighting part of the Air Force.”

Forrest Striplin McCartney was born on March 23, 1931, in Fort Payne, Ala. His father was an electrical contractor and his mother a schoolteacher. He graduated from the Gulf Coast Military Academy in Mississippi and received a degree in electrical engineering from the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1952. His first military assignment was with the Air Force Logistics Command at Robins Air Force Base, Ga.

He also earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in 1955. His major was weapons technology.

Besides his daughter Worthy, General McCartney is survived by his wife, Ruth; another daughter, Margaret Sizemore; and three granddaughters.

General McCartney recalled that during his first year as director of the Kennedy Space Center, when he was still on active duty, people would ask how he wanted to be addressed. “I said you can call me anything you want to,” he said. “So some people liked to call me by my first name, some by Mister, and some by my military grade. And I really didn’t care.”

Worthy McCartney, asked how she remembered that, said, “Most people called him General.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2012, on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Forrest S. McCartney, 81; Helped Revive Space Shuttle. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe